“Your authors are a microcosm of the state of the world,” Mariellen Sandford wrote me, when I told her of the challenges we faced completing our issue. I would describe what our contributors went through as “extraordinary”—but unfortunately none of it was. The invasion of Ukraine; the strain of screen life on eyes, bodies, and brains; the US 2020 election and its discontenteds; the ferocious and increasingly numerous fires, floods, and hurricanes around the globe; the pandemic generally and the coronavirus individually; the challenges to mental health exacerbated by the inability to travel, to be with loved ones, to engage in familiar and necessary social routines… Each of these hit our intellectual community over the three years of planning this issue, each challenge not only individual but also collective.

Our issue is about presence, but we could, with no shift in meaning, say it’s about absence. We are dominated by what we are missing. Presence defined not as a binary with absence, but as only coming into being with absence: this was something conceivable in the fall of 2019 but is so fundamental in 2022 that it appears to mark an epochal shift. It threads through our essays as it has shaped the experiences of our lives.

This is not the first historical moment to question presence, absence, liveness, the real and the only partially real, the authentic and the copy, the form and the representation. But the layers of uncertainty appear to be multiplying, and the “absence” component of “presence” is at center stage. “Loss, grief, and traumatic alienation” (as Joe Roach frames it) have shaped our present, and they are co-present with us every minute of our lives. Memories and yearnings and the dead and the missing interact with our thoughts, senses, speech, actions, emotions, and ways of being in a continuum of absence and presence that is, literally, the stuff of life.

In thinking, over the last three years, about the mobius strip of things that are there and things that are not there—and how each only comes into being with the other—several artists have seemed more relevant to me than ever before. Two, in particular, returned to me as I worked on the essays in our issue; artists who embraced dyschronia (as Kara Reilly defines it, “an experience of time that is not linear, in which multiple moments of history coexist in space”) and brought the absence in presence into view right where it lives.

In Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, memories, sensations, and emotions flow together in cresting and falling sentences, seamlessly weaving together the thoughts of characters who are seeing the past while watching the present and imagining the future. As conversation unfolds, “Real swallows were skimming over real grass,” and one character sees the birds, a home from her past, and the barn in which a play has just performed simultaneously. It is a prose conjuring of dyschronia that has a counterpart, in cinematic form, in Peter Watkin’s extraordinary 1974 film Edvard Munch. Watkins places scenes from Munch’s life alongside each other, interweaving, for example, the sickness of his sister with him painting her after she’s dead; memories of youth with his adult years; a kiss on the neck with later despair of missing the woman that kissed him; and on and on. Watkins conjoins times, memories, and artistic creation by collapsing everything that normally separates them in logical communication and linear thinking, showing us how each present moment is formed by the presence of absent experiences.

Many of us will remember these last few years in terms of what went missing, what we yearned for that was abruptly taken away. I share these artists alongside our issue as a reflection on the simultaneity of the here and then, the here and gone, the here and not-here, and how performance, and the arts more generally, accept the co-presence of absence and presence, reminding us that every second of our lives contains both.

The new issue of TDR is available now.